OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Distributed Optimisation with Linear Equality and Inequality Constraints using PDMM
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we consider the problem of distributed optimisation of a separable convex cost function over a graph, where every edge and node in the graph could carry both linear equality and/or inequality constraints. We show how to modify the primal-dual method of multipliers (PDMM), originally designed for linear equality constraints, such that it can handle inequality constraints as well. The proposed algorithm does not need any slack variables, which is similar to the recent work [1] which extends the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for addressing decomposable optimisation with linear equality and inequality constraints. Using convex analysis, monotone operator theory and fixed-point theory, we show how to derive the update equations of the modified PDMM algorithm by applying Peaceman-Rachford splitting to the monotonic inclusion related to the lifted dual problem. To incorporate the inequality constraints, we impose a non-negativity constraint on the associated dual variables. This additional constraint results in the introduction of a reflection operator to model the data exchange in the network, instead of a permutation operator as derived for equality constraint PDMM. Convergence for both synchronous and stochastic update schemes of PDMM are provided. The latter includes asynchronous update schemes and update schemes with transmission losses. Experiments show that PDMM converges notably faster than extended ADMM of [1].
Nested Event Extraction upon Pivot Element Recogniton
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Nested Event Extraction (NEE) aims to extract complex event structures where an event contains other events as its arguments recursively. Nested events involve a kind of Pivot Elements (PEs) that simultaneously act as arguments of outer-nest events and as triggers of inner-nest events, and thus connect them into nested structures. This special characteristic of PEs brings challenges to existing NEE methods, as they cannot well cope with the dual identities of PEs. Therefore, this paper proposes a new model, called PerNee, which extracts nested events mainly based on recognizing PEs. Specifically, PerNee first recognizes the triggers of both inner-nest and outer-nest events and further recognizes the PEs via classifying the relation type between trigger pairs. The model uses prompt learning to incorporate information from both event types and argument roles for better trigger and argument representations to improve NEE performance. Since existing NEE datasets (e.g., Genia11) are limited to specific domains and contain a narrow range of event types with nested structures, we systematically categorize nested events in the generic domain and construct a new NEE dataset, called ACE2005-Nest. Experimental results demonstrate that PerNee consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance on ACE2005-Nest, Genia11, and Genia13. The ACE2005-Nest dataset and the code of the PerNee model are available at https://github.com/waysonren/PerNee.
Applying BioBERT to Extract Germline Gene-Disease Associations for Building a Knowledge Graph from the Biomedical Literature
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Published biomedical information has and continues to rapidly increase. The recent advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP), have generated considerable interest in automating the extraction, normalization, and representation of biomedical knowledge about entities such as genes and diseases. Our study analyzes germline abstracts in the construction of knowledge graphs of the of the immense work that has been done in this area for genes and diseases. This paper presents SimpleGermKG, an automatic knowledge graph construction approach that connects germline genes and diseases. For the extraction of genes and diseases, we employ BioBERT, a pre-trained BERT model on biomedical corpora. We propose an ontology-based and rule-based algorithm to standardize and disambiguate medical terms. For semantic relationships between articles, genes, and diseases, we implemented a part-whole relation approach to connect each entity with its data source and visualize them in a graph-based knowledge representation. Lastly, we discuss the knowledge graph applications, limitations, and challenges to inspire the future research of germline corpora. Our knowledge graph contains 297 genes, 130 diseases, and 46,747 triples. Graph-based visualizations are used to show the results.
SoRTS: Learned Tree Search for Long Horizon Social Robot Navigation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

The fast-growing demand for fully autonomous robots in shared spaces calls for the development of trustworthy agents that can safely and seamlessly navigate in crowded environments. Recent models for motion prediction show promise in characterizing social interactions in such environments. Still, adapting them for navigation is challenging as they often suffer from generalization failures. Prompted by this, we propose Social Robot Tree Search (SoRTS), an algorithm for safe robot navigation in social domains. SoRTS aims to augment existing socially aware motion prediction models for long-horizon navigation using Monte Carlo Tree Search. We use social navigation in general aviation as a case study to evaluate our approach and further the research in full-scale aerial autonomy. In doing so, we introduce XPlaneROS, a high-fidelity aerial simulator that enables human-robot interaction. We use XPlaneROS to conduct a first-of-its-kind user study where 26 FAA-certified pilots interact with a human pilot, our algorithm, and its ablation. Our results, supported by statistical evidence, show that SoRTS exhibits a comparable performance to competent human pilots, significantly outperforming its ablation. Finally, we complement these results with a broad set of self-play experiments to showcase our algorithm's performance in scenarios with increasing complexity.
Causal Reasoning: Charting a Revolutionary Course for Next-Generation AI-Native Wireless Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Despite the basic premise that next-generation wireless networks (e.g., 6G) will be artificial intelligence (AI)-native, to date, most existing efforts remain either qualitative or incremental extensions to existing "AI for wireless" paradigms. Indeed, creating AI-native wireless networks faces significant technical challenges due to the limitations of data-driven, training-intensive AI. These limitations include the black-box nature of the AI models, their curve-fitting nature, which can limit their ability to reason and adapt, their reliance on large amounts of training data, and the energy inefficiency of large neural networks. In response to these limitations, this article presents a comprehensive, forward-looking vision that addresses these shortcomings by introducing a novel framework for building AI-native wireless networks; grounded in the emerging field of causal reasoning. Causal reasoning, founded on causal discovery, causal representation learning, and causal inference, can help build explainable, reasoning-aware, and sustainable wireless networks. Towards fulfilling this vision, we first highlight several wireless networking challenges that can be addressed by causal discovery and representation, including ultra-reliable beamforming for terahertz (THz) systems, near-accurate physical twin modeling for digital twins, training data augmentation, and semantic communication. We showcase how incorporating causal discovery can assist in achieving dynamic adaptability, resilience, and cognition in addressing these challenges. Furthermore, we outline potential frameworks that leverage causal inference to achieve the overarching objectives of future-generation networks, including intent management, dynamic adaptability, human-level cognition, reasoning, and the critical element of time sensitivity.
Guided Cooperation in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning via Model-based Rollout
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Goal-conditioned hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) presents a promising approach for enabling effective exploration in complex, long-horizon reinforcement learning (RL) tasks through temporal abstraction. Empirically, heightened inter-level communication and coordination can induce more stable and robust policy improvement in hierarchical systems. Yet, most existing goal-conditioned HRL algorithms have primarily focused on the subgoal discovery, neglecting inter-level cooperation. Here, we propose a goal-conditioned HRL framework named Guided Cooperation via Model-based Rollout (GCMR), aiming to bridge inter-layer information synchronization and cooperation by exploiting forward dynamics. Firstly, the GCMR mitigates the state-transition error within off-policy correction via model-based rollout, thereby enhancing sample efficiency. Secondly, to prevent disruption by the unseen subgoals and states, lower-level Q-function gradients are constrained using a gradient penalty with a model-inferred upper bound, leading to a more stable behavioral policy conducive to effective exploration. Thirdly, we propose a one-step rollout-based planning, using higher-level critics to guide the lower-level policy. Specifically, we estimate the value of future states of the lower-level policy using the higher-level critic function, thereby transmitting global task information downwards to avoid local pitfalls. These three critical components in GCMR are expected to facilitate inter-level cooperation significantly. Experimental results demonstrate that incorporating the proposed GCMR framework with a disentangled variant of HIGL, namely ACLG, yields more stable and robust policy improvement compared to various baselines and significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art algorithms.
InSpaceType: Reconsider Space Type in Indoor Monocular Depth Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Indoor monocular depth estimation has attracted increasing research interest. Most previous works have been focusing on methodology, primarily experimenting with NYU-Depth-V2 (NYUv2) Dataset, and only concentrated on the overall performance over the test set. However, little is known regarding robustness and generalization when it comes to applying monocular depth estimation methods to real-world scenarios where highly varying and diverse functional \textit{space types} are present such as library or kitchen. A study for performance breakdown into space types is essential to realize a pretrained model's performance variance. To facilitate our investigation for robustness and address limitations of previous works, we collect InSpaceType, a high-quality and high-resolution RGBD dataset for general indoor environments. We benchmark 12 recent methods on InSpaceType and find they severely suffer from performance imbalance concerning space types, which reveals their underlying bias. We extend our analysis to 4 other datasets, 3 mitigation approaches, and the ability to generalize to unseen space types. Our work marks the first in-depth investigation of performance imbalance across space types for indoor monocular depth estimation, drawing attention to potential safety concerns for model deployment without considering space types, and further shedding light on potential ways to improve robustness. See \url{https://depthcomputation.github.io/DepthPublic} for data and the supplementary document. The benchmark list on the GitHub project page keeps updates for the lastest monocular depth estimation methods.
EvalLM: Interactive Evaluation of Large Language Model Prompts on User-Defined Criteria
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

By simply composing prompts, developers can prototype novel generative applications with Large Language Models (LLMs). To refine prototypes into products, however, developers must iteratively revise prompts by evaluating outputs to diagnose weaknesses. Formative interviews (N=8) revealed that developers invest significant effort in manually evaluating outputs as they assess context-specific and subjective criteria. We present EvalLM, an interactive system for iteratively refining prompts by evaluating multiple outputs on user-defined criteria. By describing criteria in natural language, users can employ the system's LLM-based evaluator to get an overview of where prompts excel or fail, and improve these based on the evaluator's feedback. A comparative study (N=12) showed that EvalLM, when compared to manual evaluation, helped participants compose more diverse criteria, examine twice as many outputs, and reach satisfactory prompts with 59% fewer revisions. Beyond prompts, our work can be extended to augment model evaluation and alignment in specific application contexts.
Don't Let MEV Slip: The Costs of Swapping on the Uniswap Protocol
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

We present the first in-depth empirical characterization of the costs of trading on a decentralized exchange (DEX). Using quoted prices from the Uniswap Labs interface for two pools -- USDC-ETH (5bps) and PEPE-ETH (30bps) -- we evaluate the efficiency of trading on DEXs. Our main tool is slippage -- the difference between the realized execution price of a trade, and its quoted price -- which we breakdown into its benign and adversarial components. We also present an alternative way to quantify and identify slippage due to adversarial reordering of transactions, which we call reordering slippage, that does not require quoted prices or mempool data to calculate. We find that the composition of transaction costs varies tremendously with the trade's characteristics. Specifically, while for small swaps, gas costs dominate costs, for large swaps price-impact and slippage account for the majority of it. Moreover, when trading PEPE, a popular 'memecoin', the probability of adversarial slippage is about 80% higher than when trading a mature asset like USDC. Overall, our results provide preliminary evidence that DEXs offer a compelling trust-less alternative to centralized exchanges for trading digital assets.
Overview of Computer Vision Techniques in Robotized Wire Harness Assembly: Current State and Future Opportunities
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Wire harnesses are essential hardware for electronic systems in modern automotive vehicles. With a shift in the automotive industry towards electrification and autonomous driving, more and more automotive electronics are responsible for energy transmission and safety-critical functions such as maneuvering, driver assistance, and safety system. This paradigm shift places more demand on automotive wire harnesses from the safety perspective and stresses the greater importance of high-quality wire harness assembly in vehicles. However, most of the current operations of wire harness assembly are still performed manually by skilled workers, and some of the manual processes are problematic in terms of quality control and ergonomics. There is also a persistent demand in the industry to increase competitiveness and gain market share. Hence, assuring assembly quality while improving ergonomics and optimizing labor costs is desired. Robotized assembly, accomplished by robots or in human-robot collaboration, is a key enabler for fulfilling the increasingly demanding quality and safety as it enables more replicable, transparent, and comprehensible processes than completely manual operations. However, robotized assembly of wire harnesses is challenging in practical environments due to the flexibility of the deformable objects, though many preliminary automation solutions have been proposed under simplified industrial configurations. Previous research efforts have proposed the use of computer vision technology to facilitate robotized automation of wire harness assembly, enabling the robots to better perceive and manipulate the flexible wire harness. This article presents an overview of computer vision technology proposed for robotized wire harness assembly and derives research gaps that require further study to facilitate a more practical robotized assembly of wire harnesses.
Explainable Machine Learning for ICU Readmission Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The intensive care unit (ICU) comprises a complex hospital environment, where decisions made by clinicians have a high level of risk for the patients' lives. A comprehensive care pathway must then be followed to reduce p complications. Uncertain, competing and unplanned aspects within this environment increase the difficulty in uniformly implementing the care pathway. Readmission contributes to this pathway's difficulty, occurring when patients are admitted again to the ICU in a short timeframe, resulting in high mortality rates and high resource utilisation. Several works have tried to predict readmission through patients' medical information. Although they have some level of success while predicting readmission, those works do not properly assess, characterise and understand readmission prediction. This work proposes a standardised and explainable machine learning pipeline to model patient readmission on a multicentric database (i.e., the eICU cohort with 166,355 patients, 200,859 admissions and 6,021 readmissions) while validating it on monocentric (i.e., the MIMIC IV cohort with 382,278 patients, 523,740 admissions and 5,984 readmissions) and multicentric settings. Our machine learning pipeline achieved predictive performance in terms of the area of the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) up to 0.7 with a Random Forest classification model, yielding an overall good calibration and consistency on validation sets. From explanations provided by the constructed models, we could also derive a set of insightful conclusions, primarily on variables related to vital signs and blood tests (e.g., albumin, blood urea nitrogen and hemoglobin levels), demographics (e.g., age, and admission height and weight), and ICU-associated variables (e.g., unit type). These insights provide an invaluable source of information during clinicians' decision-making while discharging ICU patients.
Real-Time Emergency Vehicle Detection using Mel Spectrograms and Regular Expressions
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

In emergency situations, the high-speed movement of an ambulance through the city streets can be hindered by vehicular traffic. This work presents a method for detecting emergency vehicle sirens in real time. To obtain the audio fingerprint of a Hi-Lo siren, DSP and signal symbolization techniques were applied, which were contrasted against an audio classifier based on a deep neural network, using the same 280 audios of ambient sounds and 52 Hi-Lo siren audios dataset. In both methods, some classification accuracy metrics were evaluated based on its confusion matrix, resulting in the DSP algorithm having a slightly lower accuracy than the DNN model, however, it offers a self-explanatory, adjustable, portable, high performance and lower energy and consumption that makes it a more viable lower cost ADAS implementation to identify Hi-Lo sirens in real time.
A Truly Concurrent Semantics for Reversible CCS
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

Reversible CCS (RCCS) is a well-established, formal model for reversible communicating systems, which has been built on top of the classical Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS). In its original formulation, each CCS process is equipped with a memory that records its performed actions, which is then used to reverse computations. More recently, abstract models for RCCS have been proposed in the literature, basically, by directly associating RCCS processes with (reversible versions of) event structures. In this paper we propose a different abstract model: starting from one of the well-known encoding of CCS into Petri nets we apply a recently proposed approach to incorporate causally-consistent reversibility to Petri nets, obtaining as result the (reversible) net counterpart of every RCCS term.
Single Image Test-Time Adaptation for Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) methods improve the robustness of deep neural networks to domain shift on a variety of tasks such as image classification or segmentation. This work explores adapting segmentation models to a single unlabelled image with no other data available at test-time. In particular, this work focuses on adaptation by optimizing self-supervised losses at test-time. Multiple baselines based on different principles are evaluated under diverse conditions and a novel adversarial training is introduced for adaptation with mask refinement. Our additions to the baselines result in a 3.51 and 3.28 % increase over non-adapted baselines, without these improvements, the increase would be 1.7 and 2.16 % only.
SurrogatePrompt: Bypassing the Safety Filter of Text-to-Image Models via Substitution
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Advanced text-to-image models such as DALL$\cdot$E 2 and Midjourney possess the capacity to generate highly realistic images, raising significant concerns regarding the potential proliferation of unsafe content. This includes adult, violent, or deceptive imagery of political figures. Despite claims of rigorous safety mechanisms implemented in these models to restrict the generation of not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content, we successfully devise and exhibit the first prompt attacks on Midjourney, resulting in the production of abundant photorealistic NSFW images. We reveal the fundamental principles of such prompt attacks and suggest strategically substituting high-risk sections within a suspect prompt to evade closed-source safety measures. Our novel framework, SurrogatePrompt, systematically generates attack prompts, utilizing large language models, image-to-text, and image-to-image modules to automate attack prompt creation at scale. Evaluation results disclose an 88% success rate in bypassing Midjourney's proprietary safety filter with our attack prompts, leading to the generation of counterfeit images depicting political figures in violent scenarios. Both subjective and objective assessments validate that the images generated from our attack prompts present considerable safety hazards.
Data Upcycling Knowledge Distillation for Image Super-Resolution
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Knowledge distillation (KD) compresses deep neural networks by transferring task-related knowledge from cumbersome pre-trained teacher models to compact student models. However, current KD methods for super-resolution (SR) networks overlook the nature of SR task that the outputs of the teacher model are noisy approximations to the ground-truth distribution of high-quality images (GT), which shades the teacher model's knowledge to result in limited KD effects. To utilize the teacher model beyond the GT upper-bound, we present the Data Upcycling Knowledge Distillation (DUKD), to transfer the teacher model's knowledge to the student model through the upcycled in-domain data derived from training data. Besides, we impose label consistency regularization to KD for SR by the paired invertible augmentations to improve the student model's performance and robustness. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the DUKD method significantly outperforms previous arts on several SR tasks.